Ted the Titan, who made a big stink in June 2003, is back in bloom and headed for the bay.
The 10-year-old corpse plant is expected to bloom within the next few days, and managers at the 91ż´Ć¬ Davis Botanical Conservatory are loaning him to the Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, so an expanded audience can get a whiff for themselves.
Amorphophallus titanum — also called titan arum or "corpse flower" because of its smell, which has been compared to rotting fish, bad eggs or a dead elephant — is native to Indonesia. Ted was grown from seed at the 91ż´Ć¬ Davis Botanical Conservatory.
Ted also bloomed for about a week in 2003, producing a roadkill scent and marking the first blooming of a titan arum at the conservatory. Corpse plants usually take up to 15 years to bloom and rarely do so in cultivation. The 2003 blooming attracted more than 4,000 visitors and a flurry of experiments from campus scientists eager to pin down specific biological mechanisms involved in creating the pungent perfume.
For details about corpse plants that have bloomed on campus, see .